Inside Amazon

I rarely use Amazon. Probably use them even less.

It's one thing to expect people to work hard. It's another to treat ill people unfairly, shove people aside and have no sense of human decency.

 

If the stuff about the warehouses/labor camps didn't do it, I doubt it would move the needle to know about the travails of workers who can go anywhere and whose stock has almost doubled in the past year.

 

Maybe they should come up with some thing akin to the carbon-offsets play such that if you buy something from Amazon, you spend a corresponding amount targeted at human decency.

I bought my son a laptop through Amazon the other day. Wonder how much, on the margin, I'd need to spend at NotAmazon to make up for the decency deficit.

 

#newsroomstoo

 

Newsroom people do it to themselves. I did.

 

Wouldn't be successful without doing so.

 

Anybody out there who thinks the Amazon white-collar work environment is unique is kidding him/herself. You want to work at or near the top of your field? You want to make (potentially) a shit-pile of money? You want to be involved in some ground-breaking stuff? That kind of a work environment is the nature of the beast.

What do y'all think it's like being on the partner track at big law firms? What do you think it's like being on the tenure track at a seriously top-flight university? What do you think it's like being a mid- or upper-level staffer at the White House?

 

Oh, sure. Incentive/motivation in a newsroom is all self-generated, and those people are more often exploited than rewarded. I'd love a little competition at work, but my guess is that my desire to be more involved is seen as "pushy" in certain circles.

 

#successwithoutsacrifice

 

I think at some of your examples, the expectation is you bust your ass for a while and get to become a partner, get tenure, get to the end of your guy's term, etc.

In Amazon, it seems some people work their ass off only to get pushed aside when they slow down a bit, get sick or whatever.

 

Obviously those stories are upsetting, but I think we should remember that we are only hearing one side of the story.

I also think that if you looked at any company that employed a similar number of people over the period of years that we're talking about, you would find similar horror stories.

 

I'd be curious to know how many other companies require a confidentiality agreement that governs everything related to employment there, not just proprietary information.

I'd also be curious to know how many other companies tag their employees so they can be monitored every second of every day, and send them texts to get back to work if they even lapse for a few minutes, as Amazon has done in the past.